The present invention relates to conveyor systems, and more specifically to conveyer systems for shopping carts.
Currently, many large department stores occupy single floor buildings that include many different product departments and thus have a footprint that covers tens of thousands of square feet. In these large department stores, shoppers typically use shopping carts to carry selected merchandise throughout the store while the shopper continues to select merchandise from the various departments within the store. Since a shopper may be selecting a large number of items having substantial weight, shopping carts are essential in the current department store environment.
Large department stores are commonly located in suburban areas where enough land is available to build a single-story store large enough to include all of the merchandise to be offered by the retailer. Some large department store chains have been unable to open stores in large, populated urban areas due to the unavailability of large blocks of single-floor retail space. However, in these same urban areas there are often a number of multi-floor vacant buildings that would be large enough to accommodate the floor space required by the department store. Department stores are reluctant to utilize these multi-floor buildings due to the inability of the department store to transport shopping carts between the various floors of a multi-level store. Although elevators can move shopping carts between the various floors of a multi-floor store, elevators are unable to handle the large number of consumers typically found in one of the large chains of department stores.
In order to address this problem, shopping cart conveyors have been designed to move shopping carts on an inclined conveyor along side an escalator. One such shopping cart conveyor is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,490,979, assign to Pflow Industries of Milwaukee, Wis., which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. In the Pflow patent, the shopping cart conveyor moves specially-equipped shopping carts between floors of a building.